Demartek Evaluation of NetApp Flash Storage Portfolio

7 January 2014

Flash (solid state) storage options are proliferating and are being adopted in enterprise datacenters
with increasing regularity. IT professionals must be aware of the wide variety of flash-based storage
solutions, including those deployed in the servers and in the storage systems, and be able to determine
the best fit for their applications. In those cases where mission-critical applications need the fastest
performance, an all-flash storage solution can be the right choice. In other cases, a solution that uses
flash as an intelligent caching layer combined with hard disk drive technology may be the best choice.
Furthermore, caching solutions can be deployed in the servers or in the storage systems or both.

NetApp integrates flash technology across their entire line of storage systems, including the FAS, V-Series,
EF-Series and E-Series product families. The solutions for the FAS and V-Series product families are part
of the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier product family.

NetApp commissioned Demartek to evaluate these technologies by running various performance tests,
and these reports are available on the Demartek website. This document provides a summary of the
architectures of the NetApp flash solutions available today and the new FlashRay™ family expected
to become available in 2014.

Demartek performance evaluations of specific NetApp Flash technology are listed on the left side
of this page under “Related Content.”

More information

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